Faustite issued a slow nod to Ceraskia. He looked to the vial in his hand — thin and filmy with a youma's neglected particulate — and watched for signs of memory in its milky, gilded turns. It was the single brilliant sliver in Negaspace's collection of drab greys with foreboding purples. Violet mouths of endless caverns gnashed in the distance, obscured by silt-laden air, and so tarnished by time that they wove their stories out of centuries. The vial in his hand acted much the same: it pulled from time all these boundless, senseless threads and sprung a tapestry from nothing.

Was it folly to chase these ends? Did he see anything more than a false cognizance spun from gold? He couldn't know. Magic expected a measure of blind faith from all its participants, him included, and he was inclined to give it. Inclined to see beyond the veil of this life and into another, whether skewered by the fizzle-crack burn of chill or pressing hand and heart to someone else. The treasure of the vial was in tasting the many moments held by these miskept strangers, watching dew form on flowers old, watching moments shared in an ephemeral privacy long dispelled. He wanted to peer into that which wasn't meant for him. He wanted the oversight it afforded as he peeled back the decadent secrecies piled over someone's love-touched life. He wanted the power that promised, even if he lost a measure of individuality to do it.

He could betray his heart to someone if they betrayed themselves.

First he sat, ankles loosely crossed, on one of the old, great boulders beyond the Citadel. Its smooth, slate-tarnished surface afforded room enough for both of them, though he expected Ceraskia would prefer to stand. With the cork stopper pinched between fingers, he looked to her warningly as he plucked it from its hold. No scent came — no steam, no sizzle, no bubble of viscous, molten gold. It sat and waited unassumingly. It was almost polite.

Faustite tipped the vial into his mouth. His tongue met the fluid — sharp, yet flavorless — and he felt nothing. He felt the skin on his body the cold vial in his fingers, the old drumbeat of his heart singing its declaratives to his bones. He looked to Ceraskia, half-expecting an explanation. Clawed fingers curled against the stone and left their tally count of disappointments. Hello world!Was it hallucination, then? Dehydration? Deprivation? Gilded fractures spread their hands, and he felt it then: the singular, pealing whine of his life losing relevance.

Blinking, he peered through ethereal glimmers, traipsing stars, swirls of bloated color and light. The world coalesced slowly into recognizable shapes. A smudge of brown became a desk chair. Fleeting flickers became turning wind chimes hung just over the an open window. Great casts of grey became the washed stone, ever at work, and the columns on which it rested its haunches. Ceilings climbed impossibly high and floors stretched far with thick carpet. His feet whispered susurrant over plush violet as he-not-he ran.

He passed hallway after hallway as his breath shuddered, his heart guttered and his mind stuttered. Was the message true? Would he find a long-awaited clue buried in the annals of someone's mind, hidden like a sentimental treasure? And who was the one so dauntingly left unnamed in his knight's message? Who walked these halls that so taunted his confidant into silence?

Gilded white gloves beat against the molded door before the latch gave. They slipped down smooth, curving metal while light poured in from a gap, searing, blinding, brilliant until his eyes adjusted past the causeway's delicate dim.

First into focus was his Desdemonan contact: a woman garbed in grandeur and ostentatiousness. Not yet assuming a knight's identity, she wore a red velvet slip punctuated by striped stockings and glittering, deadly heels. A part of Velvet suspected that she killed someone with those heels -- put their eye out and drove the spoke of that shoe straight into their brain. She moved with purpose, poised and confident as a trained dancer, and commanded a quiet air about herself that ensconced everyone in the room. Arlisse led, they heeled -- Velvet included.

Beyond her and atop Velvet's unassuming cot sat the source of his correspondent commotion. Long-legged and pale, Vanja sat with her hands pooled in her lap. They folded and unfolded, flexing metacarpals outward like piano strings puppeteering her will. Eyes obsidian-dark glared vitriol at Arlisse -- whether out of grudge or personality conflict, Velvet knew not. But his heart swelled at the sight of her, its potency settling into his fingers like a pleasant heat, and he drew to her magnetically. Hands sought hers insistently, even as she retracted them from Velvet's reach. He settled for seating himself at her side.

"I didn't know you were Elsan," Velvet muttered quietly.

"I don't talk about it." Tight-lipped, Vanja looked on at the two with defiance glittering in her eyes. Her pursed lips an angry cut on her face, she spoke her words like so many knives. "What I'm doing is already treason. Our senshi wants only the best for her contacts. Only the best for her friends. And we are proud -- too proud to sell our own to poachers. Even to you, Velvet." She looked almost apologetic.

Almost. "But Chaos' spread supersedes loyalty, as much as I loathe to admit it." Her fingers curled into ivory hooks against her furred leather breeches.

With hip cocked and posture contrapposto, Arlisse flung her hand out in a curt wave. "So tell us what you know already?"

Vanja shook her head. Ivory hair dropped in thin strands about her ears, wagging their disdain. "My reasons for doing this come first. You have to know. Everyone has to know.

"We don't believe in your arranged marriages." Her ire raised to Arlisse, who looked to her nails boredly. "We do as we please, how we please, when we please. Our senshi kept Juliet a living secret because she saw a warrior's heart in that girl. She saw something worth keeping away from this bullshit marriage arrangement. I follow my senshi, Velvet -- all that she chooses is for the good of our planet. You have to know that I believe in her absolutely, because she is the warmth that chases out the bone-chill of our winter cold. She is the food and drink that sates us. But this…"

Sighing, Vanja marched on resolutely. Her voice quavered lightly, so overcharged with emotion that she struggled against its rawness. "We never knew that chaos was spreading on Juliet in her absence. However slight, I cannot abide it. I can't continue my duties at the Academy until their senshi returns to their planet. We are kin in the cold, you understand? However they choose to live, they know the same bone-chill we do. They don't deserve chaos creeping into their frostbitten hearts. No one does. She needs to go back -- to save her planet.

"I don't know where our senshi keeps her. I've seen her but once, and it wasn't public. She was huddled away under smock and cloak and coat until I could see no more of her than a familiar face in the midst of a blizzard."

So much you'll keep hidden with the proudest heart, thought Velvet, bittersweetly. For as much as he knew her, as much as he gleaned of her hardy heritage, he knew so little of her life. "Let me see --"

"I will tell you when you may see, Velvet. The same goes for you, Arlisse -- I don't trust your planet or your intentions."

"Come on, then," the other girl spat. "Time's wasting. You said you wanted Sailor Juliet back on her planet, right? So cough it up already." She spread arms wide, settled into a saunter toward their accompanying full-fledged knight. "Show us this great, big secret you saw. You should know better than to leave us hanging on your morals when an entire planet is at stake."

"Know that I'm not doing this for you," Vanja shot back

Vanja wrinkled her nose before she turned to her companion. "Our planet has many cities, all walled, all reticent to let in strangers. I don't know in which city Juliet stays. Bear that in mind when you visit Elsa, and give our Senshi my deepest condolences."

Velvet nodded in silence. Thick lashes fell as he looked from her stern countenance to her unguarded heart. Bare with only an ermine trim framing it, her sternum dared him for his touch. At last he flexed his vermeil hand, fingers keening lightly under their bronze framework, before he pressed his hand to that warm swath of skin. "I'm sorry," he prefaced, the words a breath under a whisper. An afterthought abandoned in a sigh.

Velvet turned, and in a motion, Vanja mirrored him. "Try to remember what happened," he coached, as he pressed his bejeweled hand to Vanja's sternum. There, just beyond heart and bone, her starseed glimmered with certainty --

Winter ripped and scathed and tore at everything it touched. It marred branches with its teeth. It grazed houses with deep cuts of ice that aged far beyond anyone she'd ever met. It left thick tracts of ice that every Elsan had to chisel back, else they lose their settlement to the algid plague. That's what all their cities felt like -- settlements. Desperate outcroppings of people against the domineering storm. But their ancestors didn't shiver and starve their way through the pregnant winter only for their progeny to die in it.

Vanja cut her teeth on that notion. Even when moored in the whispered woods, she clung fiercely to that tenacity. That night, she carved her way out of snow banks thicker than he was tall, her leg bleeding, her side gouged with marks of tree or beast -- she couldn't tell which anymore. The forest tried to cover her tracks, to block out the sky, to scrape away at her last ice-glimmered defenses against the bitter snow. The forest was very much alive that night -- and as ready as the wendigos to eat her.

But she hobbled her way past the tall walls in the dead of night, where guards nearly mistook her for the beasts they hunted. Desperate, she used the old stick she carried to lurch her body the rest of the way into relative safety. There, in the marketplace, few lingered at this time of night; winter ills froze the sunless hours so deeply that everyone guaranteed frostbite outside of an hour. But a pair of lanterns hung, neatly sequestered with black backing, toward the furthest edge of the market.

Vanja sucked in a painful breath. She squared shoulders against the rotting pain in her side, persistent like a needy child, and dragged her stick through the snow. She tried to form words but her first breath was stolen away by the blizzard winds. They caught sight of her then, before she could speak again.

And the glimmer in their eyes was panic-born. Beadily they stared out at her, ands frozen, cloaked and masked, wary and every bit as exhausted as she. They shared a bone-deep paranoia covered by their natural tenacity. All except for one -- a thin, tiny woman no larger than a child and no more hardy. Compared with the rest, she looked like someone's ill-fated babe but for the gilding over her brow --

"Help," Vanja mumbled into the icy winds. Winter tugged and gnawed at her cloak as she moved onward. She stumbled into one of their thick merchant's stands. "I was cut!"

The group retreated further back to the tall, austere logs of their outer walls.

"Not by them." She prayed it so. But ever more, now, her gaze reached the child in her midst. More and more she suspected the girl, and recognition slowly claimed her face. A foreigner, not an adolescent.

One of the taller hooded figures strode forward. "I'll help you." He extended his hand, fraught with gnarls, and scooped Vanja's elbow with an unpleasant terseness. "This way."

But Vanja never refrained from looking back. Ever more her eyes strayed to the foreigner, now more huddled, her jaw working softly to form words only for her company. She knew by shape of lips alone that they spoke of her senshi. Whoever this girl was -- by shade and urgency -- Vanja knew they sought her Senshi. Their senshi.

Velvet wrenched the device from her chest, and with it, her conviction from his own emotional jumble. Jaw set, he spoke quietly. "Thank you.

"That was Sailor Juliet. That was the break we needed. I know you feel like you betrayed your people, Vanja, but you just saved someone else's." He stole away her hand and looked at Arlisse, who only rolled her eyes.

"Please, take me to Elsa. Be my eyes. I need you for this -- her planet needs you. She needs you."

The words lingered in the room, a heavy blanket deadening her thoughts. Vanja never expected the part of a hero, nor did she lust for it. Even Velvet remained under the veil of her healthy suspicion, and suspicion seldom fed the Academy's glorious stories of older heroes. Here, he begged her hand. Deferred to her. Appealed to her bold nature. It would not be Velvet's pleas that swayed her, she decided. It would be her Senshi's health, her safety, her longevity.

"Once we reach Elsa, I will only be your interpreter. You choose where you want to go."

Velvet loosed a breath he never knew he held. "Thank you.

"Please, go on without me. I'll catch up in a moment; I have some packing to do." There, the world glimmered and throbbed but once. It swelled with a prou peak of color, then evened into the neutral tones that comprised the Academy. Arlisse and Vanja were gone at once, with Velvet shifted to the side of his bed. Dutifully, albeit quietly, he pried up a floorboard with his bare fingernails. Beneath it sat an unassuming tin, gilt with nothing but the dust motes in such an unused space. He stripped the shield glove bracelet from his hand, wrapped it in his namesake cloth, and tucked it into the dingy canister. He screwed it shut and replaced the floorboard. Then, after seizing his overnight bag from the top of the bed, he sprinted out of the room.

The state of the world ripple-warped again, and Velvet stagger-stepped down a spiral set of stairs. One by one by one he went until he landed in a long, wide corridor. He dashed to the left, crossing over rich runners flanked on either side by knights' emblems, then met with another intersection. South and east and south and east he dashed until windowed walls looked out into a wide, breathtaking landscape. He spared no moment to view the vast kingdom as he crossed the last few steps into the main hallway. Past the double doors he strode, into the white, and into a last world throb that pared away all recognition.

Faustite drew breath, ragged and desperate. Blinking away the last flecks of memory, fresh with a blaring headache, he looked to Ceraskia. She showed no signs of worry -- no hints that they'd at all left the space. His jaw gnashed for words, even the blandest, to describe what he saw. None came.

But he had to keep moving with those secrets in his ears.

the spaaaaace cauldron
I am using a Golden Vial here for its main memory.